Winning House is also an Art Museum - Lyon Housemuseum

The Lyon Housemuseum, a private house in Kew, Victoria, Australia designed as an art museum by Melbourne architectural practice Lyons has been awarded the Harold Desbrowe-Annear Award for Residential Architecture 2010 in the Australian Institute of Architects, Victorian Awards.

Architect Corbett Lyon lives with his wife and two children in the Lyon Housemuseum and says he wants the house to become a new cultural destination for Victoria.

“Lyon Housemuseum allows us to combine passions for architecture, art and family life in a setting that aspires to be a new cultural asset for the community” said Corbett Lyon.

The Lyon Housemuseum a privately funded cultural project established by the Lyon family to support and promote contemporary art, architecture and music has been nominated for the 2010 Premier’s Design Awards.

The design references a long lineage of precedents of private museums and private collections in domestic settings which include the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, John Soane’s Museum in London, New York’s Frick Collection and Melbourne’s Heide Museum.

The Lyon Housemuseum has been the subject of international interest and in June the Housemuseum was visited by members of the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation and Collection Advisory Board.

The Lyon family sought to create a unique and innovative setting for the display of art and architectural artefacts interwoven with the domestic settings of a house.

The Housemuseum contests the ubiquitous „white cube‟ museum space seen in museums globally, offering gallery visitors a more personalized experience, revealing visions of the collector, the artists with whom they have related and collected and the artworks exhibited in a private context.

Conventional „house‟ and „museum‟ spaces blur in their readings so that the family kitchen is also the museum café and the black box showing video art is also the home cinema/sleepover space.

Visitors from across Australia and overseas including students, architects, academics, artists, musicians, art lovers, museum directors and curators have attended the Lyon Housemuseum since opening in September 2009. Specific events, musical performances, lectures and tours are scheduled and Housemuseum visiting sessions for 2010 can be viewed and arranged from the website.